Built by a tired mom.
Hi, I'm the founder of KNOT — a mom, and the only one in this house who can tell one scent from another. I've been using incense for years, long before I ever thought about selling it.
My husband is a developer — he built this website and he's great at code, but hopeless at naming things. He calls our incense "the smoke things" and once asked, very seriously, if anyone actually pays for these. We have a running joke: I pick the scents, he picks the bugs out of the code.
While sourcing products, I kept coming across Chinese incense holders and incense sticks. The holders turned out to be as beautiful as they were practical — little mountains, leaves, waves, all hand-finished. The sticks are hand-rolled in small workshops. But I wasn't in a hurry to sell them. I bought them for myself first, lived with them, and tested them for over a year — only then did I decide to share them.
But here's the real reason I started KNOT: we're tired. Bone-tired. My day is school drop-off, a video call with toothpaste on my shirt, laundry that never ends, and a toddler who treats bedtime like a hostage negotiation. His day is stand-ups, on-calls, and bugs that follow him home. By 9 p.m., we're two zombies on a couch. So we light a stick, pour the tea, and take ten minutes that are just ours. No toddler. No Slack. No bugs. This brand is for every exhausted parent — you give everything all day, and you deserve a moment that's just yours. Something good, shared with care. And yes — we need to make money too.
